Sure. It's just that the Romans were more systematic about it, not merely behaving as they did as opportunity prevailed. As I say, though, this argument is moot. The point of the video is ultimately about something different. Why were they so brutal?
The Athenians and Assyrians and Aztecs were quite systematic. But I suppose the Romans had the largest and best organised empire.
> Athens invaded Melos in the summer of 416 BC and demanded that the Melians surrender and pay tribute to Athens or face annihilation. The Melians refused, so the Athenians laid siege to their city. Melos surrendered in the winter, and the Athenians executed the men of Melos and enslaved the women and children.
> Furthermore, partisans on both sides of the political divide are publicly highlighting different problems facing the military, which may deter their followers (and their followers’ children) from considering military service
> Painting the entire U.S. military as either woke or extremist undermines public support for the institution and the people in uniform, and often deflects examination of concrete problems that are affecting military capabilities and readiness.
> The Wagner-affiliated channel that originally circulated the video claimed that being accused of brutality during a war is like getting fined for speeding during a car race, which is the same remark made by the channel following the summary execution of ex-Wagner fighter Yevgeny Nuzhin in November 2022.
@Cerberus Arabic ج ل س (jalasa) meaning to 'sit' converted with the م prefix @Cowp linked a few days ago that generates the names of places, hence مجلس (majlis) means 'the place where people sit'. Imported to Persian to mean 'the parliament' or whatever you want to call it, then imported to Qazaq
And in Pakistan as well, called Majles-e-shura, something like that, all Arabic words imported into Farsi imported into Urdu, meaning "the place where people sit and exchange ideas"
> The source of [Bitcoin] is still unknown, and it is surrounded by a great deal of mystery, problems, fears and dangers. Even now, the facts [about Bitcoin] are not clear to us, so we are unable to issue a fatwa concerning it.
@Mitch well, that's a pretty dank and deep rabbit hole. The ones that are supposed to be performance enhancers are placebo because Chinese charlatans really pretended successfully for a while that their plants are miracles. But one does not simply enhance the brain without serious side effects, so CNS stimulants have all the nasty side effects you know of.
For neurodegenerative diseases, we have drugs that are definitely not placebo, but they slow the progress of the disease, they don't enhance or cure anything.
@Mitch alkaloids are messy. Some don't feel anything, some feel a lot of things. Doses of caffeine that would consistently enhance the brain do make a hole in your stomach
@alphabet than caffeine? No. The thing with these CNS drugs is a lot of people and some medical professionals, unfortunately, keep calling them safe just because their LD50 (median lethal dose) is not low. But drugs aren't toxic just when they kill
@Mitch no it's totally true. Again, lots of gene polymorphisms and variability in response.
@Mitch no, I'm just saying dextroamphetamine is also not a safe drug. I mean, it's safe to say no drug with any significant neurologic impact is safe
I'm assuming people don't drink crazy amounts of caffeine, but the other day somebody told me people drinking 5 liters of tea every day is normal, so what do I know
Neither me nor I suspect modern medicine can fully answer what lingering positive or negative effects its use may have. Of course, when it's validly prescribed, the pros undoubtedly outweigh the cons
@M.A.R. It's basically an advice column run by Salafi imams, the sort of people who most Muslims consider way too radical. I don't think they're "actively pro-terrorism" radical, but they're definitely "democracy is bad, credit cards are evil, buy a niqab" radical.
I'm not at all surprised that it's banned in Europe.
I never used bitcoin, although I first read about such ideas even before it first appeared. I used to read a popular computer magazine KompuTerra, it had articles about distributed systems based on public key encryption.. there was even a curious article on how to ensure transparent political voting with public keys. It was too complicated for me though.
> In Islam, lifelong celibacy or monasticism is forbidden. Marriage is encouraged for everyone.
Interesting.
In Christianity, celibacy was introduced as a means to prevent corruption in the Catholic Church.
Begetting kids in a high office easily leads to corruption.
> St. Peter, often seen as the first pope, as well as many subsequent popes, bishops, and priests during the church's first 270 years were in fact married men, and often fathers of children.
@CowperKettle Islam's version of the ideal clergymen was people who mingled with people, with varying degrees of success. Especially during the sixth Hijri century, however, mystics and sufis appeared and transformed the idea of holy man to a reclusive hermit not unlike some Buddhist sects
It was a load of wash, of course. These reclusive hermits formed their own little cults of personality and walked around leeching off people and signing autographs
@CowperKettle Incidentally, IslamQA is very insistent that Muhammad had sex with a 9-year-old: islamqa.info/en/answers/44990/…
The real gem:
> you should note that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) grew up in a hot country, the Arabian Peninsula. Usually in hot countries adolescence comes early and people marry early. This is how the people of Arabia were until recently. Moreover, women vary greatly in their development and their physical readiness for marriage.
Maybe he just married her and consummated the marriage years later.
> Her father, Abu Bakr (r. 632–634), became the first caliph to succeed Muhammad, and after two years was succeeded by Umar (r. 634–644).
> Tabari appears to suggest that she was born during the Jahiliyyah (before 610 C.E), which would translate to an age of about twelve or more at marriage.
@CowperKettle well, I feel like the overcomplicated benefits of Bitcoin tooted by its supporters every chance they get is 1) unlikely to happen any time soon, and 2) a bit reductionist in that they clearly refuse to admit its faults and reject an (unbiased) cost-benefit analysis
@CowperKettle yeah which is where the Shiite and the Sunni muslims deviate in their beliefs.
I think that if celibacy was introduced to avoid corruption.. why not allow priests to have sex, but without having kids and without marrying? Maybe allow them to have sex blindfolded, with women who are unknown to them.
Or with added-reality eyeglasses masking the faces.
Something like this.
Fukuyama tells in his "Origins of Political Order" about the quaint scheme used by the Ottoman empire to avoid corruption by kidnapping Christian children and forbidding them to marry, but allowing to rule whole regions.
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman times to the French Revolution is a 2011 book by political economist Francis Fukuyama. The main thesis of the book covers three main components that gives rise to a stable political order in a state: the state needs to be modern and strong, to obey the rule of law governing the state and be accountable. This theory is argued by applying comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. The book covers several regions (China, India, Papua New Guinea as well as Western and Eastern Europe separately), and uses case...
@Mitch actually, antibiotics kill a lot of 'good' microbes in the intestinal flora, which is one of the major reasons, besides resistance, superinfection and a few other things, to limit antibiotics use to prescriptions and to rigid empiric rules
Also related is CDAD (C. Difficile Associated Diarrhea) and a plethora of other gastrointestinal problems associated with antibiotics use.
@Cerberus I suppose, but what I mean is the influence came from the East, I think, with conquests of India
> When questioned about her treatment the patient remarked that she had followed her EyeMD’s suggestion of taking dietary riboflavin but stated that she felt “if 50 mg was good, I thought 500 mg would be better.”
To her sheer luck, riboflavin is water-soluble and does not accumulate in bodily tissues. Phew.
Does the word "near" have a weak form? I often pronounce it with a schwa (like the weak form of "for") when unstressed; I'm curious as to whether this is standard.
@M.A.R. So you're recommending that you take antibiotics with your heroin so that the diarrhea of one will counteract the constipation of the other?
Yes, you're definitely recommending that.
@jlliagre I don't know what kouglof is but it sounds great!
@CowperKettle The progress has been amazingly quick. When GANs came out in ... 2015? they could reproduce fuzzy faces, and within 4 years it could make faces that look like normal faces as though they were real (but of course were entirely made up).
OK 2014.
By 2018 you had to look really close to see features that were artifacts of the generation (like extra teeth or fingers)
@alphabet Do you have an example context sentence or two where this happens (and where it doesn't)?
@Mitch It happens in "The store is right near the school," but not in "Near the school there is a store," "I don't mean the store in the school, I mean the store near the school," or "The time is coming near"
These are consistent with being a weak form, along with the fact that it's never mandatory. It seems less felicitous with the adverbial use of "near", and marginal with the adjectival use
@Mitch By weak form I mean that it can be pronounced with a /ə/ when unstressed in certain contexts (like "can," "for," etc.) making it sound like "nurr."
I would avoid it before "here" ("It's right near here"); I'd need to think if there are other cases where it sounds wrong.
(I hypothesize that this is a less-common or regional weak form, since it isn't listed on typical lists of valid weak forms but seems quite natural to me.)
@alphabet Sure, I suppose. For me anything unstressed will sort of fall away to a shwuh (or even less) in uncareful speech (my usual way).
And since I am (or rather will be when everyone recognizes it unconditionally) ruler of the world, then I am the literal ruler by which others measure their correctness, then that is what is correct.
Il ne faut pas vouloir ajouter À ce qu'on a, ce qu'on avait; On ne peut pas être à la fois Qui on est et qui on était. Il faut savoir choisir; On n'a pas le droit de tout avoir: C'est défendu. Un bonheur est tout le bonheur; Deux, c'est comme s'ils n'existaient plus.
@Robusto I've never understood truffles. Are they mushrooms or chocolate? Why would pigs not just gobble them down (mushrooms or chocolates) if they found them? Can they be -that- good? I don't think so.
@Mitch painful is intense, yes. Methotrexate is an important example because 5 mg vials are administered in rheumatoid arthritis flares and 50 mg vials are anticancer. Due to medication errors and/or oversight on the physician or the pharmacists' part, there are examples of methotrexate poisoning that often lead to death
@Mitch what you referred to is called the cascade effect, avoiding which is one of the guiding principles of pharmacotherapy. You administer drug X, the patient shows an adverse effect, you administer drug Y, so another adverse effect shows up, and so on and so forth. It's easy and lazy to treat symptoms instead of digging into the cause
Interesting fact: nearly all foods advertised as "truffle" in restaurants use artificial flavoring. Even when there are pieces of truffle in a dish, they'll usually use much cheaper, far less flavorful truffles, and then make up for it with the fake stuff.
Incidentally It's what's considered the main difference in quality of care between developed and developing countries in healthcare. People think physicians in Iran, compared to, say, America, know less or prescribe worse drugs. That's true in less than 1 percent of the cases. It's instead that physicians in a better healthcare system are more vigilant about polypharmacy
@Mitch no, it's not related. It's related to folic acid, @Cowp's favorite molecule. Folic acid is chemically modified to bind the enzyme more strongly (thus inhibiting it), and to become more selective for human cells. Without folic acid, cells can't proliferate. Cancer cells die, immune cells stay in lower numbers
@Mitch methylphenidate is Ritalin, an amphetamine derivative. Methotrexate is the anticancer drug (more accurately an 'antimetabolite', since folic acid is a metabolite)
What's interesting is if you use a folic acid derivative that's selective for bacteria, you've made an antimicrobial agent instead. A.K.A. Sulfonamide antibiotics
Well, if you wanna be splitting hairs, some people don't like to call them antibiotics since they're synthetic, not natural.
@Mitch Have you read his book Sadly, Porn? I highly recommend it. (It's a 20-page pornographic story followed by like 200 pages of extensive social commentary, including a long rant about The Giving Tree and how everyone misinterprets Thucydides).
(He published it under the pseudonym "Edward Teech," you can find the Kindle version on Amazon.)
Relatively strong earthquake here! I was sitting on chair and working on laptop, everything shook including me LOL and just after 10 seconds I could see everyone in the street outside. Never happened before. It proves it was significant in my state.
@M.A.R. Yes. One runner got inflammation of joints, and is getting this drug to dampen inflammation. Can't run, so he goes around making photos of runners. I wish there were more advanced drugs available.
The Giving Tree is an American children's picture book written and illustrated by Shel Silverstein. First published in 1964 by Harper & Row, it has become one of Silverstein's best-known titles, and it has been translated into numerous languages.
This book has been described as "one of the most divisive books in children's literature"; the controversy stems from whether the relationship between the main characters (a boy and the eponymous tree) should be interpreted as positive (i.e., the tree gives the boy selfless love) or negative (i.e., the boy and the tree have an abusive relationship)....
I heard something about Thycidides, but nothing about The Giving Tree
@CowperKettle A tempest in a teapot. Silverstein wrote a lot of good stuff for children, but people are far and away trying to rewrite the book in their minds if they see bad stuff in there. My advice: if you don't like it, move on and find something that works for you.
Ah. Probably like the poem "My Papa's Waltz", which some people see as a description of abusive relationship (drunken dad beating up his son), some see as a description of nostalgia about a drunken by good-natured dad
In seismology, an aftershock is a smaller earthquake that follows a larger earthquake, in the same area of the main shock, caused as the displaced crust adjusts to the effects of the main shock. Large earthquakes can have hundreds to thousands of instrumentally detectable aftershocks, which steadily decrease in magnitude and frequency according to a consistent pattern. In some earthquakes the main rupture happens in two or more steps, resulting in multiple main shocks. These are known as doublet earthquakes, and in general can be distinguished from aftershocks in having similar magnitudes and nearly...